Stay on target

Last year SpaceX CEO Elon Musk briefly touched on a plan that he thought could lead to human colonization of Mars. It was… stunning to say the least. His plan required thousands of launches using the largest rockets ever built. But now Musk has published the outline for the project in the academic journal New Space.

The paper doesn’t reveal too much new. But the mission proposal may well be the most ambitious thing people have ever done. Most of the heavy lifting will be done with an array of SpaceX Raptor rockets. These are still under development, but each will be three times burlier than the Merlin engines that drive Musk’s current line of Falcons.

If constructed as outlined, the booster for the Interplanetary Transport System (the main spacecraft) would be the most rocket ever constructed by almost an order of magnitude, dwarfing even NASA’s stunning Space Launch System. These boosters would each launch, land, and refuel several times to get the craft ready for its Mars voyage. From there, they’re off. Musk hopes that by launching many of this craft, we can jump-start a Martian colony and have a million people on the planet in just 50 years.

This whole plan relies on countless things going really, REALLY well. But Musk is unfazed. As these rockets have to launch, land, refuel, and take off again, the paper suggests that SpaceX will be able to land the booster essentially directly back onto the launch pad so that it could be ready to go again in hours.

That, Musk hopes will be enough to get each of the massive ITS crafts crewed and ready to go — these ships will remain in orbit, getting ready before launching when Earth and Mars positioned well in their orbits. Once the ITS delivers its payload, workers will refine Martial soil into fuel to send the ship back to Earth so it can repeat the process. This is the key. The Achilles’ heel of spaceflight is the tremendous cost. Musk’s push for reusability, though, save tens of millions or more on launch costs now. At this scale, the benefits become truly staggering. These missions, if successful, could end up running hundreds of billions less than they otherwise would.

When Musk first discussed the plan it seemed like the stuff of dreams. His company had had a launch pad failure — one that crews are still repairing — just weeks before. Since then, though, the company has definitely been spooling up for something big.

For starters, Musk has clearly been prototyping key parts for his mega-rockets. A massive fuel tank was pressure tested not long ago. That’s not much, but these things take years, and Musk says the system won’t be ready for at least another decade.

Even so, SpaceX has hundreds of job opening right now — and almost all of them are geared for Martian projects. Let’s not forget that the Falcon Heavy launch is just around the corner, either. What’s more, the company’s demonstrated its ability to investigate failures and address them quickly. SpaceX has since resumed its launch schedule and has been pressing to make up for lost time. That demonstrates a capacity for recognizing and quickly remedying engineer problems — a level of adaptability that’s vital for a project so large. Obviously, it’d be better if the rockets didn’t explode at all, but if it’s going to happen, you might as well learn something from it, right?

Oh god… I sound like Musk now. I think I’ve been listening to his speeches a bit too much. *Ahem*

Anyway. With due respect, even with the company’s ability to iterate quickly, it’s tough to imagine thousands of launches carrying up to a million people total going totally perfectly without a single lost ship. Even if this mission works, and Musk’s team can really make a city on Mars happen — we’re probably going to have casualties. And they’re going to be sooner rather than later. If this happens, we may be looking a very nuanced era of space travel. We’ve lost people, of course, never dozens or even hundreds at once. For all the hope and wonder space flight can bring, the future of our journey to the stars will be a long and complicated one.

Apollo 1 was the first major disaster of the US space program. Three astronauts died in an accident on the ground — before the craft could even launch. NASA honored the lives loves with the posthumous mission motto: Ad Astra Per Aspera.

“A rough road leads to the stars.”

The road ahead is likely rough indeed, but someone’s gotta be the plucky go-getters in the future, and it might as well be us. Itur ad astra.